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Closure isn’t a half bad time if you want to experience a uniquely difficult yet easily playable puzzle platformer. But if you have Dark Souls, don’t bother reading further; just go play that. ‘How are they related’ you ask? Hah, well for that you will have to read on to find out!*

Escape Goat was a puzzle platformer released in 2011 for Windows and XBox Live Arcade.

It’s quite possible you missed the original Escape Goat. That’s fine now though, for two reasons: one, because there’s currently a web-playable version of Escape Goat that you can try out for free, and, two, because the upcoming Escape Goat 2 is more or less a high-resolution re-imagining of the original Escape Goat game.

Stop the presses! Aaron Alexis played video games, including “violent” ones. Indeed, the man who killed a dozen people at the U.S. Navy Yard on Monday was in fact a male under the age of sixty. And while the UK Daily Mirror is hardly what I’d call a “source,” I’ve heard this same coverage on NPR – coverage focusing on the Alexian love of video games rather than the voices in his head, voices so bad he called the police and switched hotels to dodge them; rather than the diagnosed PTSD brought on by participating in the 9/11 cleanup; rather than the history of arrests for gun crimes; rather than the flood of reports indicating that Alexis had numerous social problems and that many “close” to him feared the man well before the attack.

Deep in the Tap-Repeatedly missile silo headquarters, it has come to our attention that kids these days use something called “social media” to communicate. Apparently “The Faces Book” is the most popular of all the social medias, and we are determined to be among the first to use it.

Tap-Repeatedly is a website, it has no face. It is made of electrons. Still, some form of Face is now in this Book, and you can… you can visit? Look at? The Face is available here. It is still under construction and stuff, but early adopters like us are always on the bleeding edge. Bear with the dust and what have you.

Once you’re at our Face you have the option to Thumb us, apparently a compliment among the youth, and leave pithy messages on our “wall,” which is like graffiti but less damaging to property. I guess. It’s digital? I’m not sure what that means.

If video games were Roman defeats, Rome II: Total War would be Manzikert, which was a pretty bad showing for the Romans, one with a high cost. But the long-term effects of that battle are complex and far-reaching, over-analyzed and often over-weighted. Some historians go so far as to describe Manzikert as the event that kneecapped the Roman Empire, which is ironic because the part of it you know about was long gone by 1071 and the other part would totter on for another four hundred years. Me, I don’t buy it. Manzikert was bad, but post-Manzikert misgovernance did more damage than the battle itself. Byzantium could have recovered, it just failed to. Similarly Total War: Rome II has ample opportunity to recover from the scattershot problems of initial release and turn itself into a genuinely remarkable game. If Creative Assembly bungles that opportunity, then Rome II, like Manzikert, will be remembered as the beginning of the end.

Recently I reported on a game called Everlove, a romance game targeted at women. I’ve played the game now and, now that it’s been released on a few different platforms I’m weighing in with my thoughts. Check it after the jump.

Viewing the comments threads on video game web sites is like stepping into some alternate universe where people are sincerely anticipating Grand Theft Auto V.

Maybe I could’ve written “I am old and out of touch” and said the same basic thing. Or maybe I’m being a hipster; I’m not buying Grand Theft Auto V, you plebeians, because it is too mainstream, and it’s what everyone will be playing and I’m way too cool for that. Or maybe it’s because I’m a woman and chicks just aren’t into this sorta thing.

I’ll admit it, I was wrong! All this time I have thought, hell, fervently believed there were only three ways to get rich: (1) Inherit it, (2) Steal it, or (3) Earn it. Except for the first choice, none of those sound particularly fun; but, it turns out there is another way, a far better way and one that can be a bucket of fun, gaming enthusiasts. Did you know that computer gaming is now considered a professional sport? For example, just last month U.S. immigration officials classified the world’s top video-game players as professional athletes. Wow, does it take forever for the U.S. government to wake up, or what? We all knew how special gaming was, but all we got from the government was a lot of crap.